Israel Demeans Itself in an Affront to Armenians : Genocide: Keeping good ties with Turkey is a shameful excuse for Israel’s lobbying against a memorial--an American one, at that--to the Turks’ massacre of 1 million Armenians.

At first glance, the article in the Tel Aviv daily looked like a bad mistake. “Despite Jewish protests,” it said, a U.S. Senate committee had approved a resolution to declare a memorial day for Armenian victims of mass murder.

Israeli diplomats and American Jewish lobbyists, the article said, had opposed Senate Judiciary Committee approval of the resolution, which would declare next April 24 a memorial day for up to 1 1/2 million Armenians killed by Turks in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

Jews usually are outraged by attempts to cover up genocide. So when I saw that item, I assumed it was the kind of foul-up that newspeople have nightmares about. I figured that the reporter in Washington phoned in the story, and the poor slob taking dictation heard a burst of static as “oppose” instead of “support,” and now a whole crew of journalists was looking for a place to hide.

But similar reports kept coming. Along with the Bush Administration, Israeli diplomats were asking senators to forget the massacre, so that a minor matter of genocide wouldn’t upset relations with Turkey.

Now Israel’s Foreign Ministry is looking for cover. The ministry spokesman says that Israel “is very sensitive to the sufferings of the Armenian people.” Unnamed officials are quoted as saying that Israeli diplomats in Washington were “overzealous.” They were only supposed to “make inquiries” about the Senate resolution. Apparently we’re to believe that diplomats, not journalists, were the victims of bad phone lines. A guy here must have said, “Find out about this Armenia thing,” and someone in Washington heard, “Fight hard against this Armenia thing.”

If that’s the excuse, it isn’t good enough.

This isn’t the first time the Foreign Ministry has tried to help Turkey deny its past. In June, 1982, the Jerusalem Post reported that the ministry had made “persistent and comprehensive efforts” to block the holding of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in Tel Aviv. The ministry objected to workshops on the murder of the Armenians; Turkey would be upset, and ties with Ankara might suffer.

In 1985, the ministry reportedly tried to talk Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek out of taking part in a memorial meeting by Armenians here. According to the daily Haaretz, Foreign Ministry officials were quick to claim a payoff for lobbying against the Senate resolution: Turkey voted against a move to reject Israel’s credentials in the United Nations.

Even now, ministry officials admit that the envoys in Washington were instructed to “make inquiries” about the resolution in response to a Turkish request. If the diplomats goofed, it was by pushing too hard, by letting their efforts end up in the news.

What’s behind the foul-up is not a faulty phone line, but a faulty understanding of the lessons of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry.

No Jew can treat the Holocaust simply as history. It’s a powerful symbol that obligates us today. But there have always been two ways that Jews read the symbol.

For some, the Nazis’ crime is essentially that they killed Jews. Its lesson is that we must make sure that no one ever poses a threat to Jews again. As victims of the ultimate crime, the Jews are owed a huge moral debt by the rest of the world, but our only obligation is to protect ourselves.

The second school also stresses that the Nazis singled out Jews. To forget that is to erase the victims’ names from their tombstone. But on a moral level, what makes the Nazis’ action a crime is not that the victims were Jews, but that they were people. It’s that the criminals defined a part of humanity as less than human and proceeded to eliminate it by mass murder.

Read that way, our history tells Jews that we have a special duty to speak out against any act of genocide, whoever the victims may be. It doesn’t matter whether the killers use guns, gas chambers or hydrogen bombs.

The difference between the two views is as clear as the line between egotism and ethics. Sadly, Israel’s diplomats took the path of egotism.

If something helps wash away the bad taste, it’s the public reaction in Israel. Members of the Knesset from across the political spectrum have signed a statement denouncing “all efforts to consign mass murders of any kind to oblivion.” Their message should guide Israel’s response to any genocide, past or threatened.